


Keep a little of it

by redgear



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 10:30:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13052187
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redgear/pseuds/redgear
Summary: There is still some place left in Avonlea for fairies.





	Keep a little of it

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeBibish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeBibish/gifts).



It took Matthew a good while to work himself up to it -- nearly two years, which by many accounts might run over _a good while_ and into ridiculousness, even for a man like Matthew Cuthbert, who would hardly have known how to be hasty if he’d been asked to be so. He knew it himself, in fact, and a bit of uneasiness had started growing into the way he adjusted the thing in his mind when he had a bit of spare time, trying to line it up just so and never quite managing it.

The problem was that there was a core of ridiculousness that had nothing to do with the length of time and everything to do with _him_. He’d never been a forgetful man, either, even if he didn’t have his sister’s sharp wit, but he’d forgotten _it_ all together, as if it had never been, until that evening only a few weeks after Anne had come to them, when he’d been out to Carmody and Marilla had taken Anne to the Barry’s for the first time. Matthew had come home with a pocket full of candy to find Anne rhapsodizing about the journey and her friend and their plans, and then she’d said something that was no odder than any of her fancies but which struck him so queerly he nearly tripped on the doorstep coming in: _“We have agreed to call the spring down by the log bridge the Dryad’s Bubble. Isn’t that a perfectly elegant name? I read a story once about a spring called that. A dryad is sort of a grown-up fairy, I think.”_

Marilla had something to say about that which he didn’t quite hear. But the little fit was gone as suddenly as it had struck, and then he was inside. The pink glow of Anne’s still-narrow cheeks took him instead, and the package of chocolate sweeties was in his hand all at once, witches and fairies forgotten.

That had kept it back until well into the night, when he’d half-woken in the midst of something between dream and memory: himself, on that same bridge Anne had mentioned, late in the evening years and years ago, when he’d been fair younger than she was now, and someone had been with him, and they’d been talking about -- something. That was all.

As spring warmed into summer he dreamed it more often, once a week, twice, and some of the details sharpened into convincing reality and stopped fading when he woke. The sturdy bark of the log underneath his boot. The ripple of the water under that. The lilting accent, but never quite the words, of the old man he’d been walking with, and the click-tap of his walking stick against the bridge.

By harvest he was dreaming it every day. He didn’t like to mention it to Marilla, who had never had much time for nonsense, and usually that would’ve been that, but now - now there was another possibility.

“Well now,” he said, early one morning when a yawning, tight-braided Anne was setting out to brace the chicken coops. He had his arms full of harness that he’d fixed the evening before, and the whole thing was very peculiar, but Marilla was safely in the barn with the cow for at least the next few moments, and he immediately felt guilty for thinking it. “Good morning, Anne.”

“Good morning, Matthew,” Anne said promptly. She eyed the leather straps with a certain amount of curiosity, but what she said instead was, “It’s frightfully chilly this morning, don’t you think? There’s a nip to the air like it was alive and trying to bite your nose. But the leaves are so beautiful it hardly seems to matter at all, does it?”

“I suppose not,” Matthew said. He looked dutifully at the trees that Anne was gazing at, but he couldn’t quite concentrate on the green-and-orange patchwork. “Say now, Anne,” he said, and was fully prepared to go on until she looked up at him expectantly and the rest of the words melted right out of his head like ice under the sun.

 

He came in late that afternoon to find that Marilla had gone to an emergency meeting of the Carmody Aid Society, surrounding a mysterious and possibly tragic affair -- or so Anne told it -- and as a result Anne was left alone to get up the supper and tell him a story so winding and beautiful and confusing that he could no more have interrupted her to ask about himself than he could have flown. It had fairies in it, as so many of Anne’s stories did, beautiful miniature ladies who lived in mushrooms or pine groves, and it finished up sometime quite after dinner with, “And I should so like to see a fairy -- just once -- _really_ see one, I mean, not just imagine that the willow leaves swaying were a cloak, or that the birches were frozen dryads -- wouldn’t you, Matthew?”

“I dunno,” Matthew said, startled by the sudden question, or the sudden opportunity. Anne sighed romantically but didn’t pick up the thread again; she leaned against the kitchen window in silence, staring out into the last bits of twilight. Marilla would be home at any moment, he not-quite-thought, and said, surprising himself again with the sudden memory and with his own voice, “But we used to put out milk for the brownies, years ago. I s’pose that’s not what you mean.”

“Oh,” Anne said, thoughtfully at first, and then again, with deep consideration. “Oh? Well -- no, it isn’t, quite, I don’t think, but --” She turned, looking earnest. “ _Any_ sort of magic must be romantical in a way, I’m sure. Did they ever come? Oh, the brownies, I mean. For the milk.”

“Well now,” Matthew said, “Maybe it was the barn cat.” That was what everyone else had said, especially after the old minister had boxed someone’s ears for paganry, and he knew that was what Marilla in all her good sense believed.

“A barn cat? Was there one, really?” Anne said. “Oh! Couldn’t we have one now? Or perhaps -- a kitten? A sweet, little one, with a pointy tail -- I saw a litter of them under a bush near the road by Mrs Hammond’s once, and they were such darlings. I’m sure they would -- would be good for mice, or --”

Marilla’s sudden arrival and discovery of the unwashed dishes put an end to that particular dream, but the memory of the brownies’ milk wove itself into the memory of the river in a frayed patchwork sort of way and there it stayed for years as he examined it one way and the next, until Anne nearly fell into the pond and was rescued by her deepest enemy.

Marilla had gone up first, and Anne next, so Matthew was quite alone in the kitchen with no one to see as he dipped out a bit of the milk from supper into a bowl and carried it quickly out back, past the potato-patch and to the edge of the brook near the wood that fed into Barry’s pond down the way. He set it down and awkwardly stepped back. There was probably something you were supposed to say, or not to say, but whatever it was, was lost in the stretch of sixty years; he settled for saying nothing and just bobbing his head as if he’d passed someone particularly terrifying in the street, then turning and going back to Green Gables, his bed, and his dream.

In the morning the milk was gone, so he left it again, and again, falling back into the uneasy, unnatural caution of those long ago days where he’d kept at it longer than anyone knew. It wasn’t romantic, that feeling of hiding things. It mostly just made him nervous, to the point where Marilla started to give him looks that spoke of Carmody and the doctor, and then one day he went to see if the back field was ready for haying and the old man was there, an old-fashioned scythe over his narrow shoulders, all the grass save for a narrow strip between the house and the sandhills mown and bound. 

“Boy,” it said, as if Matthew was still only a youngster yet. 

The sorrel mare, despite her steady character, snorted in deep alarm, her ears flicking back and forth between them. Matthew swung down and set a hand on her shoulder to gentle her, finding as he did it that it was less to steady _himself_ than he’d thought, that it didn’t feel strange or bewitching at all to be standing here in the warm haze of fresh grass, face-to-face with-- “Urisk,” he said, the name having slipped itself into the dream a few months back, “well, now, I dunno but I’m sorry for leaving that so long. That was awful mean of me.”

The urisk smiled, craggy face wrinkling up. “You might put the cream and cordial out next time. I’ve a powerful thirst from this sun,” it said. “And keep your red-girl out of the water, or next time Jinnie won’t be satisfied with a board from the bottom of a boat.”


End file.
